This book does very well in making you question your own friendships and realising the value that they have. Thought-provoking to say the least. I am someone who is a big fan of a platonic 'love you' to friends and this book talks about how showing love in a friendship can be difficult. Would recommend.

A thoughtful reflection on Elizabeth Day’s experience as a self-diagnosed ‘Friendaholic’.

We all want to be liked and we all want friends - but what is the effect of this continuous need for validation? Who are our ‘true’ friends - and how do we know? So ‘true’ friends really exist?

I was drawn to this title because I empathise with the idea of being a ‘friendaholic’ - in this digitised world, everyone’s friends list is open to view. Why has that person picked a mutual acquaintance and not me?

This book helped me to re-evaluate my friendships and remember to make time for myself as well as others.

This was such an interesting read. I have decided that I am probably not a friendaholic as such, but I do spend a lot of time agonising over friendships which has passed me by for reasons unknown. This book has made me reexamine some of my previous friendships which have waned and made me realise that friends come and go in our lives for different reasons. I have long been of the belief that you can only have a small circle of true friends and those are the friendships you truly invest time in.

I love the idea of friendship CVs, even though they are just a pipe dream. I don’t think I could ever admit to a friendship ‘break-up’ though looking back, I can see that this would be cathartic with some of the people that I have befriended over the years.

Don’t miss this book. There is lots of good advice which is well presented and backed by suitable research. My only slight gripe was the reported chats between friends which meant that the author slipped from the first person to third, which for some reason grated on me!

Friendaholic is an interesting read, it did provide some insights into the dynamics at play within friendships but it was mostly an unpicking of the author's own friendships which are very personal to her.

That said, I did enjoy the book and there were things that I took away from it. For me, saying yes to everything I was invited to became quite overwhelming trying to keep all the friendship plates spinning, to then moving countries just before the pandemic and having no friends was hard, so both extremes I could relate to.

A reflective thinking book.

In an early section of the book there was a quote about false friends that struck a chord with myself. It was along the lines of - in sunshine they are like a shadow and you can’t shake them off, but when cloudy or dull, they are not about, An interesting thought.
I enjoyed reading this non fiction book, and have found I related to many parts of the book. They mirrored some of my own experiences in conversations with new acquaintances.
I wanted to read the book to have someone else’s perspective about friendship, and the author has been quite candid in her approach, covering various topics of different friendship roles in life. Her life experiences.
There are interspersed friend interview writings, of how the individual views friendship, and study information and quotes.
The author has a desire to be liked - Me too. I have struggled over the years with similar experiences, so I liked her work in progress approach to sorting through friendships. I think she has a strong point that friendships have not really been written about in a lot of detail, and it made me think about my own life, and friend choices.
My own personal view is some friends pass through your life for a short period, they were meant to be there at that time. You needed something from each other. Though finding a true friend in later life is more difficult, as most people have their tight friendships, or best friends. Maybe that is another book for someone to write.
So, yes, I found this a thought provoking book, a good read.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Publisher for an advanced e-book copy. Opinions of the book are entirely my own.

Thank you so much for allowing me an advanced copy of this beautiful and thought provoking book. It’s the book I didn’t know I needed to read. It was like a warm hug from a good friend. The author explores what it means to be a friend. How we manage and navigate these friendships. She is beautifully open and honest about her own friendships the ones that have carried her through her life and the ones that have fallen to the wayside. She is honest about her need to surround herself with friends for a kind of acceptance and how this has changed over the years. She draws upon fascinating studies on friendship which I found really interesting. The chapter about her friendship with Connie really touched me and I thought was so beautifully written as was her discussion with Alice about their beloved friend Moo who died of cancer. It left me in tears. Such a stunningly written book about a topic that affects us all. I adored it.

Friendaholic makes you think and reassess what friendships are and once you have read this book you will realize how multifaceted they are. friendships can play a huge role in our lives. This is certainly a book to read. I loved this and it actually made me look at myself and the friends I had but also at how I was as a friend

I made a bit of a pledge to myself to not read pandemic books because they tend to be a bit too introspective and I’m not sure i can read about covid or what people did in their lockdowns in my spare time any longer without losing the plot ( I worked a very normal day in a very normal keyworker role with no furlough and an increased caseload).
However, I quite liked this reflection about friendships and their value. I have read a couple of Elizabeth days books after sharing some experiences with her I wish I hadn’t. I like how her writing reads like taking to a friend too.
The concept of friendships and how they change has bought be a lot of shame and a lot of worry over the years and it is comforting to read that she felt the same.
It’s an easy book to read based on first person accounts but with a good range of sources too.
If you want to reflect as you go on your friendships too, worth a read!
Read through netgalley!

There're some interesting ideas and food for thought, I found it entertaining but I felt like some more depth was needed.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Friendaholic is a perfect example of the right book at the right time, I read this 2 weeks before leaving all of my friends and moving to another country and as such found great solace in the reading experience.

In this book, Day discusses friendship through a variety focus points using both personal experience and the (limited) studies and research that have gone in to it. On the surface it begins with Day discovering her people pleasing has resulted in an excess of "friends" but it is really an exploration of the beauty, joy and heartache that friends and friendship can bring.

I found myself regurgitating a lot of the information shared in this book and have already recommended it to a number of people.

This is the first Elizabeth Day book I've read and I enjoyed her style of writing and interesting thoughts on friendship and its importance in all our lives. I did find it slightly too long however and felt her ideas would have perhaps had extra clout in a more concise form.
Thank you to netgalley and 4th Estate for an advance copy of this book

I was familiar with Elizabeth Day’s work coming to Friendaholic, having enjoyed her podcast and many of her articles previously. Friendaholic is an exploration of Day’s friendships and friendship in the modern age more generally.

Friendaholic is an immensely readable book, with a clear structure and an enjoyable split of personal stories, interviews and studies. It is clear Day cares and has great affection for her friends. For this reason, I found Friendaholic relatable.

While the personal anecdotes provided an interesting angle, I am not sure Friendaholic adds considerably to the discussion about modern friendships - particularly if you have read or thought a lot about friendship. Readers of Dear Dolly, watchers of Insecure and listeners of Call Your Girlfriend will be familiar with this ground. With this in mind, Friendaholic might best serve a slightly younger reader who has not read or experienced the shifts Day describes.

Pick up this book up if: you want to think a bit further about concept of friendship

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I wasn’t sure what to expect once I realised this was non fiction however…. This was so much more than I anticipated… a real raw look at friendship. I’d do a few chapters a night and it would really run through my mind, it made me think about my life and approach to friendships,

Elizabeth Day has written this in such a way that it resonated whole heartedly with me!

Highly recommended!

I love Elizabeth Day's previous work and althought this is an interesting topic, I felt this was a bit long and probably could have been condensed into a column or an article.

While I don't necessarily agree with Day's premise that the focus of literature has been far more on romantic love rather than friendship, I warmly welcome a book solely devoted to this topic. As a self-confessed 'friendaholic', Day has many examples to draw upon and gives very personal accounts of her experiences. In an attempt at objectivity, there are a number 'case studies' giving other people's perspectives on friendship, though some of them are a bit sketchy and generalised. On the whole, an interesting and thought-provoking read.

What a great idea for a book. I really enjoyed this and it made me look at my own relationships with my many friends and found I could relate to many of the issues involved in some friendships which you know deep down are not meant to be as you are sometimes left feeling drained by other people's dramas which is not good for you. A good read

As someone who went through illness and felt very isolated during lockdown, I found this book very interesting and thought provoking. Elizabeth is a self-confessed friendaholic, she never used to pass an opportunity to gather a new friend and then tried to be all things to all her friends, despite the cost to her.
Her best friend, Emma, is happy with few friends.
I wasn’t expecting the book to be non-fiction, but am still pleased that I have read it.
I found the book very readable and clearly well researched. I was hoping for answers as to how to make friends as I feel that I have lost so many friends as our lives drifted apart and life took us in different directions (as well as lockdown). I didn’t feel that I got that, but I did get some thoughts on how to start looking for friends and the importance of expressing what I want from the friendship if I see it starting to develop.
I hadn’t thought about the different layers of friendship, or how friendships breakdown (other than through lives diverging and lockdown!) and this has given me much to reflect on.

I so wanted to love this but it just felt like the author was trying to wrangle a cat into a bag.
There are some neat observations- I particularly liked the references to the solar system - but these are buried beneath a marshmallow of slightly self-indulgent waffle. It seems like a sad indictment of society that we even need to try and analyse friendships but the author sums it up herself….”We don’t have the terminology and until we sneak it into existence, it is difficult to express what we mean with any precision”
Perhaps she should have left it there.

This is my first non-fiction by the author and enjoyed it. The title “Friendaholic” is great! As it suggests, the author self-claims that she was addicted to frienships. She says she is still learning to learn that she doesn’t have to befriend everyone. For her, the more friends she makes, the better she felt about herself. But it got to a point where she had to rethink this and realised that the quality of friendship she has was declining as she stretched herself a little too thin and she was trying to please everyone without being her true self around them. So if you have a similar approach to friendship, I think this book may help you understand your situation better to become a better friend. I don’t really share the same approach as the author, and I have read other similar books to this (“conversation on love” for example) that touches on friendship, so there are just not a lot of new information to me. But I found some interesting statistics that made sense to me, like most people change half of their friends every 7 years. So true!

This book was great. I really enjoyed Day's perspective on it. One thing I found tricky was thinking about the real people behind the book and thinking about how they might interpret this book. There was very much the 'good' friends, Emma, Clemmie, Joan who Day gives a lot of praise too and will have read this book, and then the 'bad' friends. who have been shunned or their time cut down. To be fair, Day does give her own faults in these exchanges but I couldn't help thinking how people would feel about reading some of these (fairly innocuous) slights. That said, Day is a beautiful writer and she delves a lot into how friendship works and lays out her own flaws too. I would have appreciated a bit more on how groups work, but as Day seems to prefer a one on one friendship, I guess it makes sense that this is not the focus.